''Return to Never Land,'' the breezy, confident sequel to Disney's 1953 animated classic, ''Peter Pan,'' comes outfitted with a perky tag line: ''Faith, trust and pixie dust.'' Those are the three requirements for anyone who dreams of flying without wings to become airborne.

That slogan is repeated several times in the movie (Tinker Bell supplying the twinkling confettilike pixie dust as she pirouettes) and is embodied in Jonatha Brooke's wistful end-title song ''I'll Try,'' fragments of which run through the movie. This song, one of the sturdiest to grace a Disney film, defines the pluck of the appealing central character, Jane, and serves as a perfect epigraph for the movie's celebration of the childlike fantasist inside us all.

Our notions of Peter Pan, of course, have changed considerably since 1953. In the 1970's the Peter Pan syndrome became a cliché of psychobabble applied to male baby boomers perceived as reluctant to grow up and settle down. And Michael Jackson, in professing his desire to portray Peter on the big screen, tainted the image of Peter by confusing the character with his own weirdness and emotional regression.

Although ''Return to Never Land'' uses sophisticated animation techniques that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago, it is still something of a throwback, for it pretends these iconographic associations never happened. And in projecting a Disney version of 1940's innocence, it implies that the contemporary world is incongruent with the magic kingdom of James Barrie's imagination.

Its heroine Jane (Harriet Owen), who speaks in the proper, upper-class Edwardian cadences, is a prematurely careworn youngster living in London during the blitz. She is also the daughter of Peter Pan's original playmate Wendy (Kath Soucie), who has grown up, married and had two children with a soldier off fighting at the front. In the movie's early scenes, Jane is caught on the street during an air raid and is forced to huddle in a doorway as bombs fall nearby. Who can believe in fairies in such a violent world? Although Jane and her younger brother, Danny (Andrew McDonough), have been immersed since early childhood in their mother's stories of her adventures with Peter, Jane -- to Wendy's deep chagrin -- is already a nonbeliever.

On the eve of the children's departure for safety in the English countryside, Jane falls asleep and is visited by the evil Captain Hook (Corey Burton). Bent on revenge against Peter (Blayne Weaver) and mistakenly believing Jane to be Wendy, he swoops down over the London rooftops and whisks her away to Never Land, where we meet many of the story's original characters.

While it would have been tempting to update Peter by putting contemporary slang in his mouth, the dreaded word ''dude'' isn't heard once in the picture. As it was in 1953, the movie's concept of the eternal boy is still pure Mickey Rooney with his gee-whiz man-child enthusiasm. His crew of furry Lost Boys have childish voices; they look and sound like cousins of Disney's Seven Dwarfs.

Hook, who can be quite scary on the stage, is a bumbling slapstick dandy who is repeatedly humiliated by losing his pants. The movie plays down his fiendish qualities. Instead of an evil cackle, Mr. Burton gives him a comic chortle, and instead of a crocodile Hook's oceanic nemesis is a giant orange octopus that exhibits the behavior of a squishy submarine. Thus defanged, the battles of Peter and Hook are reduced to a kind of schoolyard rivalry.

If ''Return to Never Land,'' directed by Robin Budd, from a screenplay by Temple Mathews, doesn't have a story to match the original's in breadth and imagination, it does a smooth job of recycling its characters and themes. The essence of the story finds Jane tricked into making a deal with Captain Hook in which he will sail her back to London on his ship if she agrees to help him find some buried treasure.

In a nod to ''The Wizard of Oz,'' Jane learns that returning won't be so easy. The only way back to London is by flying. And unless she learns to believe in fairies, she may end up stranded in Never Land forever. After all the fun and adventure are done, there is no place like home.

RETURN TO NEVER LAND

Directed by Robin Budd; written by Temple Mathews; edited by Anthony F. Rocco; music by Joel McNeely; production designer, John Kleber; art director, Wendell Luebbe; produced by Christopher Chase, Michelle Pappalardo-Robinson and Dan Rounds; released by Walt Disney Pictures. Running time: 72 minutes. This film is rated G.